2 Guns|Harrah's on Poydras Street — the penthouse that became the Camino Royale

The casino sits where Canal Street runs out of city and hits the river, a fat white block with a colonnade that wants to be a temple and settles for being a casino. It opened in 1999 as Harrah's New Orleans; since 2024 the name over the door has read Caesars. Its address on the Poydras Street side, 228, is the one that mattered to the production.

High up in that building is a penthouse suite, and for 2 Guns it stopped being New Orleans entirely. Dressed and lit, it became the Camino Royale — the hotel where the film's money changes hands and the double-crosses stack up on one another. It is the kind of room a production rents rather than builds: floor-to-ceiling glass, a view that reads as anywhere expensive, and enough floor space to block a scene where nobody trusts anybody.

The suite is not something you can wander into, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. What you can do is stand on Poydras at night, which is the shot the city gives away for free. The office towers go dark floor by floor, the casino stays lit at street level, and the whole corridor takes on the sodium-and-glass look that action films come to Louisiana for.

Look up at the top floors from the sidewalk. Somewhere behind that glass, two men who had each been lying to the other for a year finally worked out that neither of them was the criminal. (Locations per the film's official production notes. Photograph: Poydras Street at night, via Wikimedia Commons.)